Wife. Mom. Blogger.

When Your Life Becomes a Pinterest Fail

I recently had a day. Like, a DAY. You know the kind? When you wake up too late for coffee? (Fail.) You frantically rush the kids to dress, eat and sit still for a bumpy, mediocre ponytail that you’d have NEVER let your mom get away with. Ants invaded your kitchen while you slept – a pleasant reminder that you did a lousy job wiping down the counters after dinner last night. (Another fail.) You are a grump, and grumpiness is scientifically proven to be eleventy-gazillion times more contagious than Hand-Foot-Mouth-disease. So now your kids are all grumps, too. And you’re annoyed at them for being grumps. (Fail again.) You barely make it through carpool pickup at noon and by the time you’re flipping four burnt but passable grilled cheeses (fail) you remember that you never dropped off the husband’s dry cleaning which needs to be ready by tomorrow. (Fail.) The laundry is out of control, you don’t remember when you last mopped and your kids won’t touch their lunches. So you escape into the pantry and cry. Because how is it humanly possible for a person to spin their wheels this hard yet fail so miserably?

When I quit my paid job to stay home and raise babies, I expected a few things: 1.) My real house would now look like my Pinterest house. 2.) The stress in my life would disappear. 3.) After pouring into them daily, my children would obviously “arise and call me blessed,” à la Proverbs 31. Isn’t that supposed to be the legacy of a stay-at-home mom? That’s her entire job, what excuse does she have for failure?

Yet here I am, five years of full-time motherhood under my belt, basking in my shortcomings as I sob into the unorganized hodge-podge of processed foods I swore I’d never feed my kids.

After a teary afternoon of failure-basking, I finally snapped out of it to realize my problem wasn’t my litany of mom-fails; my problem was my misplaced identity. I’d been measuring my worth on a scale of everything but Jesus. Pinterest, Martha Stewart, the gluten-free Joneses. I measured my success by my ability to avoid feeding my kids refined sugar (hello, popsicles); by how clean my floors were (not); by how organized my pantry was (please see “hodge-podge”). Imagine the most eternally-insignificant way to gauge success, and that was my barometer.

I know better. And yet I was letting “the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful.” (Matthew 13:22) I was speeding on the expressway to fruitless living. As I put the words to paper, I now realize how out-of-whack my priorities can get. The desire for cleaner floors, my obsession with 7 extra grams of sugar and the absence of labeled snack baskets in my pantry were sending me to the brink. Who is this girl?

Have you ever done this? What kind of yardsticks do you use to measure your worth? Job promotions? Raises? Losing baby weight? Being a “Good Mom”? Punctuality? Being noticed? Being liked? Having an organized house? The list never ends. It’s great to excel in these areas, and God can be glorified in all of these things – but they cannot be the measure by which we obtain our value. If they are, we are missing the gospel. And this week, I missed the gospel.

Sometimes we know cognitively that we need Jesus’s forgiveness, but our hearts are a little slower on the uptake. Understanding the gospel and being transformed by it must go hand-in-hand.

“Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline—then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all…God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” (Hebrews 12:7-8; 10-11)

I was going through an identity crisis and I didn’t even know it until I was disciplined for it. If my hope and identity is in the eternal, if I am properly fixated on loving God and loving people; of going into the world and preaching the good news to all creation (Mark 16:15), I shouldn’t be rattled by the inability to make my pantry look adorable.

The tears of self-defeat sure as heck sting. But how grateful I am for this discipline; for the reminder that if I seek unimportant, worldly things, my life will inevitably be shattered by those same unimportant, worldly things. “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:18) So let’s turn our eyes from the burnt grilled cheeses and ant conventions in our kitchens to a kind of mind-blowing love that anchors our hollow hearts with forgiveness and hope.